How does the E4500 compare to the E6550?

[Therk]

I know its slower but by how much and is it worth paying more for the E6550?

Here In New Zealand I can either get a E4500 for ~$180 or a E6550 for ~$270.

 

[DSF]

A meaningful answer to this question would depend on a lot of things. What is the rest of your system going to look like? What do you plan to use it for? Are you expecting to overclock, or are you just looking at performance out of the box?

 

[SerpentRoyal]

On the average, the 4500 carry a speed penalty of about 200MHz. 6550 at 3.0GHz is equivalent to 4500 at 3.2GHz.

 

[Therk]

This is what I'm thinking of buying:

E4500 2.2 ghz
2 gig Supertalent DDE800 CL4 RAM
8800GT
ASUS P5K SE mobo

PC will be used for gaming 99% of the time.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

You'll need to overclock the chip north of 3.0GHz so that the GPU will be the bottleneck.

 

[zach0624]

e4500 is my vote, the e6550 is not worth the extra $100 for a little boost in performance stock and if you oc the e4500 will kill the e6550 because if you are lucky enough to get a 500fsb chip, mobo and ram then you can manage 3.5ghz which from the e4x00 and e2x00 oc thread link is doable with a p35 and a e4400 or e4500.

 

[harpoon84]

Yeah, the E4500 is easily the better value, stock or overclocked. You should get 3GHz+ easily on it, perhaps 3.5GHz with good cooling.

Under optimal conditions, the E6550 has a higher performance ceiling due to having a 4MB L2, but you will need a quality P35 mobo as well as DDR2-1000 (or good quality DDR2-800) to unleash it's full potential. Even then it'll probably only be 5 - 10% quicker than an overclocked E4500, at a significantly higher cost.

 

[Denithor]

Here in the US there is only ~$40 difference so the choice is a bit tougher, however at $100 difference the e4500 is the clear winner. With its higher multiplier it will be much easier to OC, you could probably just go with cheap DDR2-667 (fsb won't need to go above 300 compared to starting at 333 with the e6550).

Spend the extra $100 on a factory OC 8800gt (a benchmark at legionhardware shows a 720/2060 8800GT beating a stock GTX in most cases) or wait for the G92-based GTS cards to launch.

EDIT:
You can see the impact of cache in this UT3 benchmark. The step from 1MB->2MB is pretty significant but the step from 2MB->4MB is smaller. Also, as you OC the processor this difference will be reduced even further.